Bad Guys

by Anthony Bruno

  “I don’t want to talk about Dora,” Lambert ordered gruffly. He hauled himself out of his seat, turned the rest of the bottle into his glass, then wandered into the living room. He dropped into a brown vinyl recliner with a noticeable tear on one of the arms. Gibbons suspected that the chair came after Dora had left, his first attempt at decorating revenge. “You want more?” he called to Gibbons. “It’s in the kitchen, in the cupboard. I got gin. Maybe something else, I dunno, look in the back.”

  “Sure.” Gibbons went into the kitchen, which Dora had apparently remodeled when avocado and burnt orange were the “in” colors, and opened cupboards until he found the booze. There was a half-gallon of Gilbey’s, a fifth of Gordon’s, and an unopened fifth of Boodles. He must’ve been saving the Boodles for a special occasion. Behind the gin, there were a few dusty bottles. Gibbons pulled down a very old bottle of Lemon Hart rum with the Gilbey’s. If they had to keep this up, he’d be damned if he was going to drink straight gin.

  He opened the refrigerator and looked for something to eat. He figured he better eat something to soak up the alcohol or else he’d be passing out too, which would make this another goddamn wasted trip. Gibbons’s plan was to search the place for an address book, a ledger, something that might give him a clue as to where the government was hiding Varga. If only goddamn Lambert would just give his liver a break and fall asleep.

  He found the end of a loaf of white bread in a plastic bag and some liverwurst so he made a sandwich with a lot of meat on one slice of bread. The bread was very dry. After the first bite, he opened a jar of mayonnaise and dipped the sandwich in.

  Just as he was about to go back out to Lambert, it occurred to Gibbons that he could use a little ice to go with the rum. He opened the freezer and reached into a plastic bin full of loose cubes. He grabbed a handful, but his finger snagged on something. When he pulled his hand out, there was a small plastic bag dangling from his ring finger. Inside the bag there was a small black book.

  “Well, fuck me.” Gibbons grinned.

  Untying the tight knot in the bag was a challenge in Gibbons’s condition, but he eventually got it undone. As he suspected, the little black book was an address book. Gibbons flipped through it. There were just names and phone numbers, no addresses. He noticed right away that the names weren’t written under the right letters in the book. Mr. Thorval was on the F page, and Mrs. Myers was on the G page. The first entry on the D page was Dora. That was the only name with an address.

  Gibbons shook his head. He couldn’t believe Lambert could be so obvious as to put his address book in the freezer. What a dunce. Gibbons guessed that the names in the book were the new identities of the protected witnesses in his charge. They were probably entered under the last initial of their real names, which Lambert figured he wouldn’t forget.

  On the V page, there were only two entries: one for a Jim Hennessey, the other for a Mark Davis. Gibbons took out his notebook and scribbled down the names and phone numbers. If he was right about Lambert’s system, one of these guys was Richie Varga.

  When Gibbons finished copying, he put the bag with the book in it back into the freezer and covered it with ice cubes. He then put the ice cubes in his empty glass back into the bin so Lambert wouldn’t think he’d been in the freezer.

  “Hey, what the hell’re you doing in there?” Lambert yelled from the living room.

  “Making a sandwich. You want one?”

  “No.”

  Lambert was sitting perfectly still in the recliner when Gibbons returned. He looked like the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial, Abe Lincoln with an empty glass in his hand.

  “If I ask you something, Gib, will you tell me the truth?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “You ever sleep with Dora?”

  “Not on a bet, George.”

  Lambert sighed and looked into his empty glass. Gibbons went to pour him some gin, but he pushed it away. The man was a picture of troubles.

  Gibbons screwed the cap back on the gin. He suddenly felt pretty low himself. “You’re a good man, George.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  His suit hung in the closet all by itself. The suitcase was open on the turquoise vinyl chair, a blue dress shirt draped over the back. The clean clothes were in the suitcase; the dirty stuff was in a pile on the floor. Under the clean underwear there were three boxes of bullets: .38 hollow points, .44 soft points, and 9mm jacketed hollow points. On the bed, his arsenal was laid out on pieces of yesterday’s Daily News. The Beretta 9mm automatic and the Charter Arms .44 Bulldog were off to one side. The Ruger .38 Special was broken down for cleaning. Gun solvent stained the newspaper. It highlighted the little picture of Jimmy Breslin next to his column.

  It was hot as a bastard outside and the goddamn air conditioner was all but useless. Even on high, it barely threw a breeze. It did cut the humidity in the room some, but it wasn’t loud enough to block out the ringing of the gas-station bell next door. It was evening rush-hour now, and the damn bell was ringing constantly.

  Tozzi was going nuts. He was cleaning his guns because he had nothing better to do. Subconsciously he figured that if he got ready for something to happen, something would happen. He was like a writer with writer’s block sharpening a whole pack of pencils, subconsciously hoping that an idea would come to him by the time he got to the last pencil. It was Boy Scout logic: Be prepared. But the problem with this kind of thinking was that eventually the preparations can become the goal, and nothing ever gets accomplished. Tozzi realized that as he worked the small wire brush around the chambers of the revolver’s cylinder, and it only made him more impatient.

  He’d been at this crummy motel a week and a half now and he hated the place, but he didn’t want to move until he spoke to Gibbons and goddamn Gibbons hadn’t answered his phone in days. Tozzi had been cursing him all day for not having an answering machine, even though he’d probably be very wary of putting his voice on tape and thus creating physical evidence that could be used against both him and Gibbons.

  Tozzi was no good with time on his hands, he never had been. He started thinking about things, analyzing his life, and that always got him depressed. The fact that everything he owned in the world was in this seedy motel room depressed him. The fact that he had more guns than pairs of shoes depressed him. The fact that he was beyond the point of no return really depressed him.

  Tozzi had checked in on Thursday after he found Gibbons watching TV at his aunt’s place. On Friday he called Gibbons at Lorraine’s to let him know where he was, then took a ride over to Bobo’s video rental shop. Bobo nearly shit his pants when he saw Tozzi walk in, but when Tozzi took him to the back room, Bobo had nothing new to tell him, except that he’d heard that Paulie Tortorella had been picked up for torching that store in Woodbridge and that now he was out on bail.

  On Saturday morning he got in the car and just drove, heading for Joanne’s place in a roundabout way because he didn’t want to admit to himself that he really wanted to see her. When he saw a Dunkin’ Donuts on the road, he stopped and bought a half-dozen croissants. He figured she’d prefer croissants to doughnuts; she was that type. The croissants were his excuse for dropping in for brunch.

  When he got there, she looked in the bag and asked him why he hadn’t bought doughnuts. She said for future reference, she really liked cinammon crullers. After coffee and croissants, he went out grocery shopping with her. She offered to make beef Stroganoff. He watched the Mets game while she cooked. He stayed for dinner, and somewhere in the middle of the second bottle of Beaujolais, they snuggled up on the couch with the TV on. When he put on MTV, she ridiculed him for wanting to watch the all-rock video channel, but he said he’d never seen it before and he was curious. Videos are an insult to your intelligence, she said, but he still wouldn’t change the channel, so she started rubbing his crotch and wouldn’t stop. Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It” video came on then, and Joanne jumped him, pouting and mugging in his face, lip-sy
nching to the music. They wrestled on the couch, laughing and groping, tearing each other’s clothes off. When they finally managed to stop laughing, they did it on the floor. He needed a good laugh. He ended up staying the night.

  Spending time with Joanne had always been nice, but this time it depressed him afterward, and now he was still depressed. He kept thinking about the possibility of making some kind of life with her. He tried to figure out step by step how he could bring his life back to a state of normality. He was wanted for murder. He’d gone AWOL from the Bureau. Even if he could beat the murder raps, how could he ever get a job? Who’d hire him? What did he know how to do except catch bad guys? Maybe he could join the union and work construction. But somehow he didn’t see himself coming home to Joanne’s place in dusty work boots and a hard hat. That wasn’t her idea of a husband. He thought about having kids with her, but that seemed too remote to even consider.

  Everything in his life seemed disorganized, half-finished, impossible. That morning he cruised around his old neighborhood in Newark, trying to remember when things were okay. He had a pretty good pepper-and-egg sandwich at a little sub shop that used to be Lee’s Chinese Laundry. His mother and his aunts never took anything to old Mr. Lee except bed sheets that had gotten gray. They claimed those Chinese worked wonders with linens, but the rest of the laundry they could do better themselves. Mr. Lee had to be dead by now. Tozzi drove back to the motel after lunch and decided to clean his guns. He had to put something in order.

  He inserted the cylinder back into the frame of the .38 with a sharp snap. The bell at the Exxon station started to ring again, and this time it didn’t stop. “Goddamn,” Tozzi muttered. When the bell still didn’t stop, he bounced off the bed, wielding the revolver like a gun-slinger. He went to the grimy window and saw a woman in a white Volkswagen Rabbit stopped with her front tires right on the black hose. She had no idea she was the one making all the noise. “Get off the bell,” he screamed through the closed window. “Stupid bitch, pull up!”

  His hands were trembling, and in his fury he pointed the gun at her windshield and squinted down the barrel.

  “Pull up!” he yelled.

  Suddenly he pulled the trigger and flinched, expecting glass to shatter. But the gun wasn’t loaded. The click of the hammer nearly made his heart stop. He stepped back from the window and sat down on the bed, his heart pounding as he pictured that stupid woman slumped over the wheel, blood staining her dress. He wondered what the hell was wrong with him.

  The next thing he knew the phone was ringing. He stood up to get it and quickly glanced out the window. The white Volkswagen was gone.

  “Hello?”

  “I didn’t think I’d find you in.” It was Gibbons.

  “Where the hell do you think I’d be?” Tozzi snapped. “I’ve been waiting to hear from you all week. Where the fuck’ve you been, man?”

  Gibbons didn’t respond right away. “You going for an Academy Award or what?”

  Tozzi sighed and rubbed the tight muscles at the base of his neck. “What’s going on?”

  “I think I found him.”

  “What?”

  “Get ready. We’re going for a ride.”

  “What do you mean you found him?” Tozzi got up and started to pace.

  “I paid a visit on a federal marshal I know. I made a good guess that he was our friend’s liaison with the Witness Security Program.”

  “And this guy just told you where to find him?”

  “No, stupid, listen. I found the guy’s address book in the freezer. There were two names entered under V—a Mr. Hennessey and a Mr. Davis. Both had telephone numbers, but no addresses—”

  “Call Bell Security. They’ll give you the addresses for those numbers. Don’t worry. They melt when they hear ‘FBI.’”

  “I know the drill. Just shut up and let me talk,” Gibbons said. “I already got the addresses. One is in Pennsylvania, East Stroudsburg, the other in St. Paul, Minnesota—”

  “Okay, which one do you want?”

  “Stay put, will ya? I saved us some legwork.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I called credit rating companies in both areas. I said I was selling my house by myself without a broker and I wanted to run a credit check to make sure my prospective buyer was on the up-and-up. I gave them a song and dance about how I was retired and I was anxious to sell my place so I could get down to Florida. For an extra fee they said they could put a rush on it. I wired them the money, and the printouts came in the mail today.”

  “Weren’t they a little suspicious that your address is an apartment building, not a private house?”

  “I used Lorraine’s address.”

  “So what did you find out?”

  “Mr. Hennessey owes about ten grand on a whole slew of credit cards,” Gibbons said. “Mr. Davis’s sheet was blank.”

  “Davis has no credit history?” Tozzi asked skeptically. “I thought Justice had gotten hip to that. Supposedly they were giving witnesses made-up credit histories with their new identities so they could get loans and stuff like that.”

  “That’s only in the last year or so that they’ve been doctoring the credit histories. My guess is that Hennessey is a recent member of the club. Davis must be a veteran with the program, and Justice hasn’t gotten around to fixing up credit records for the people who’ve been in place for a while.”

  “So you think Davis is our man.”

  “It just might be—” Gibbons was cut off by a recorded announcement telling him that his three minutes were up and to signal when through for additional charges.

  “Hello? You still there?” Tozzi asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here. Listen, I’ll pick you up around seven.”

  “Where’re we going?”

  “East Stroudsburg. To Mr. Mark Davis’s house.”

  Tozzi nodded. “Okay. I’ll see you at seven.”

  “Right.”

  Tozzi hung up the phone. The bell at the Exxon station started ringing again, but he didn’t hear it now. The .38 was still clutched tight in his hand. Unconsciously he cocked the hammer and pulled the trigger, listening to the click of metal on metal. He did it again and again. He was thinking about Varga. He was getting ready.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “So what are we waiting for?” Tozzi said. He was sitting in the passenger seat of Gibbons’s car, fingering the grain of the vinyl dashboard, staring at the house, getting itchy.

  In the driver’s seat Gibbons stared at the small Cape Cod situated on a small lot between two bigger houses. It had white aluminum siding and dark green shutters. Even in the dark he could see that the grass needed cutting. There were no lights on in the house except for a dim one upstairs. Gibbons figured it was probably a night-light in the hallway. He ignored Tozzi’s impatience.

  Crickets chirped in the bushes beside the car. The night was humid, and every house on the street hummed with air conditioners. The back of Tozzi’s shirt was wet with perspiration. The .44 in the belt clip was chafing his side. There were no other cars parked on the street, and that was making him nervous. It was quarter after twelve, and this was the kind of neighborhood where nervous ladies call the cops when they see unfamiliar cars parked on the street. They didn’t need cops now. Cops get very indignant when they find FBI people in their jurisdiction, and they don’t like being bullshitted, which is what they’d have to do if a cruiser came along and asked them what they were doing there. The patrolmen wouldn’t simply check their IDs and go away. They’d want to go down to the station, probably call the field office for verification. No, Tozzi didn’t need cops now.

  “We’ve been staring at this damn house since eight o’clock, Gib. There’s nobody else in there but him. The lights went out an hour ago. He must be asleep by now. Let’s go get him.”

  Gibbons nodded, his eyes stayed on the house. “Yeah, I think he’s in there alone.” He said it to himself, as if he were finally convinced. This was Gibbons’s legendary caution, the ca
ution that had often driven Tozzi up a wall when they had worked together. Look before you leap, watch your step, don’t be hasty. As Tozzi thought about it, it occurred to him that his partner’s infuriating degree of caution might have been one of the contributing factors to his going renegade. A minor factor but still a factor.

  “How do we know it’s really him?” Gibbons asked.

  Tozzi pounded a steady nervous rhythm on the dashboard. “What can I say, Gib? You traced him to this address.”

  “Hmmm.” Gibbons was wearing his hat. The half-light of the street lamp illuminated his profile. His eyes were pinpoints focused on that house. His profile reminded Tozzi of Dick Tracy.

  “Suppose it is Varga,” Gibbons suddenly said. “What do we do then? He’s not going to just break down and confess to killing Lando, Blaney, and Novick simply because we found him.”

  Tozzi sighed in annoyance. “I’ll stick my gun in his eye and tell him point-blank that we know he killed three FBI agents. Then if he doesn’t start blubbering the way he should, we tell him we have Bill Kinney and that Kinney fingered him for the murders. He’ll deny it and blame it all on Kinney. Then I stay here with him and you go back to New York to do the same with Kinney. Kinney will deny it and pin it all on Varga. What do I have to do? Paint a picture for you, Gib?”

  “What if it doesn’t go that way?”

  “Then you’ll step out of the room and I’ll take care of Varga my way.”

  “No.” Gibbons said it evenly but with absolute authority. Tozzi decided not to debate the point now.

  “Gib, we’ll never find out anything if we just sit here.”

  Gibbons pulled on his nose, then looked at his watch. “Fifteen more minutes,” he said. “Let him get into a deep sleep.”

  Tozzi rolled his eyes and rubbed the flesh on his hip where the gun clip was irritating him.